


'cause i know my way out (i run, i run)

by whal



Series: i miss home, but i do not know if it's the right place for me to grow [2]
Category: League of Legends
Genre: Angst, Background Polycule, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, fluff if you squint enough
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-20
Updated: 2021-01-20
Packaged: 2021-03-18 16:33:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28870101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whal/pseuds/whal
Summary: “What am I like?”Evelynn kisses her fingers, caressing the hand she tries to be gentle with.“What were you like before you met me?”“I was drowning.”
Relationships: Ahri/Evelynn (League of Legends)
Series: i miss home, but i do not know if it's the right place for me to grow [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2117196
Comments: 6
Kudos: 83





	'cause i know my way out (i run, i run)

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by this [comic](https://twitter.com/CYMK_8/status/1346916952095088641?s=20)
> 
> [song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWgFMhsztMQ)

Pale bright sunlight peeks through the clouds. 

There’s the never-ending tunnel pummeling into the aquarium, fireworks cracking in the dark sky with the streams of light she wishes she could see--if she can lift her head up.

Snow that settles gently on the slopes of a warm house, like powdered sugar--confetti and streamers--drifting onto a blur of glitter, 

under soft, fluffy blankets. 

And glasses that are filled to brim with champagne, threatening to spill over from the clinks of laughter and cheering. 

Ahri lives in a bright house, surrounded by bright lights. 

* * *

Evelynn, the cognitive _Diva_ , is all dim lights of a disco ball in bars and the clinks of tonic and gin in a dull glass. 

Both of them find each other on a drive home, Ahri’s mouth like pomegranates picking flowers in someone else’s field. 

There’s an invitation, of any sorts, signs that Evelynn can only recognize as the fangs of a dead snake,

and she takes it as one. 

They spent years in the tango, nine months where Evelynn thinks about slipping her fingers inside Ahri’s mouth. The Earth changes, 

green bound, memories escaping the fog of spring, (she could not have loved it if she had no childhood in it), waiting patiently for Evelynn to bare her teeth and swallow her whole. 

The same flowers come up again at the start of every season, Ahri gathers it around her fingers--paint brush down the side of her back. _You are, you are._

She waits for Evelynn to cup the palm of her neck, cuffs around her wrist. Except she didn’t have to beg for it. 

Evelynn presses her forehead to Ahri’s, gentle kisses down to the nape of her neck. 

“I’ll show you what it is.” 

Slits grow and her form slithers like the force of the ocean. 

“I’ll show you what the flowers look like.” _From the Earth up_. 

Ahri isn’t drowning. She swallows the salt filling her nostrils. 

“Yes--” She waits for Evelynn to look at her. 

“Please.” 

(The flowers, Evelynn’s death, and her fingers.) 

The parlor down the road warns her of broken moon pieces, _gods_ like Evelynn who only has hunger and greed. Gods like _Evelynn_ with all desire. There was a convoluted logic to it, 

because Ahri is the same. She drags her bare feet and skips the sand into hell for Evelynn. 

All she knows is that she opens herself outward and lets Evelynn tie it softly. 

All she asked was for a confirmation. If the gods were really watching, if they see Ahri locking her fangs into a pulsing warm corpse. 

She caresses Evelynn’s face, lips pursing into a thin line. 

“What are you made of, Eve?”

Evelynn kisses her again, hands groping around in the dark. 

Feeling around for her throat. 

“Prayers.”

They kiss, all open mouthed and furious. At the entrance. 

And they kiss. And they kiss. 

And they kiss like they were starving, crawling around and roots sprouting from the dirt. 

Ahri falls asleep and dreams of night lilies. She probes for a memory asking what love really is, and decorates Evelynn’s smoke with flowers. And she sits on her lap and kisses the back of her hand, and feeds Evelynn the petals. 

She burns around the touch of Evelynn’s fingers, asking if she was stolen. 

“Eve.” Ahri melts, her warmth like the cradling arms of someone else’s. 

_I stole you._

* * *

POP/STARS debuted. A week (months) before that, Ahri’s heart was pointed somewhere else. 

She’s convinced she hasn’t grown up--her mind finds Evelynn placing a hand onto the back of the front seat--her seat--and steers into the parking lot. Parking spaces. 

She’s convinced not even Evelynn has grown up. Not the swipes of her credit card, high-end fashion sense and her snarling her teeth, dating people-- _men_ \--and getting them to wipe her dirt-covered heels. 

They’re growing older, that’s for certain. Growing into the accumulation of years in their bodies and faces. 

There’s an expectation to feel like they’re themselves, waking up to the feeling of being their age. There’s an onion, onion layers on the table where Kai’Sa peels them off, onion rings inside a tree trunk--little Russian dolls inside her old home. 

Each year inside the next one. 

She certainly doesn’t feel twenty-four. She certainly doesn’t feel like being ten, either. 

It brings her here, again, to tonight. Brows furrowed and heaved breaths after the pumping adrenaline of another performance, Eve by her side, hands curling around her waist. And ties their hands together--

Leaning forward into the mirror of the dressing room, her finger dipping into the flow of Akali’s rap lines, the audience like the infinity of small stars that would break like fish. 

It isn’t stardom she’s looking for, she feels like she’s losing something else, loving an absence and making shapes out of that space of nothing. (The sounds of the lake’s water splashing in the distance.) 

To be alive and to want, a hunger for something more. To be alive and want something more than just tracing a blue line of Eve’s vein across her hand, a way to say “I want you the way I peel my skin back, layer by layer.” 

She’ll always want the earth, the sky, the wind--the ocean. She’ll never have enough of it, because by “layer by layer” she means a sparrow nest in her hair and the stars on her face and “layer by layer” means she _wants_ this. 

Layer by layer means she wants Evelynn to know everything inside her. Tendons and bones and the promises of a dimension where she gets to see a content Eve. 

A pale sound of Eve’s slowed breaths and running fingers through tangled magenta hair. 

Ahri often has dreams of swimming in the quarry and she rises again when Evelynn calls for her, the mattress groans when she tries to pull Evelynn into the night, from over their heads. 

There’s the lights shining from her eyes, two full moons Ahri floats behind from, her lungs filling with the wet sound of Evelynn’s hips. She pulls Ahri in, 

and she was so sure it could have been anybody else. 

But Evelynn makes her sing without a sound, and Ahri wakes up telling herself that she still wants this. 

She still lives in a bright house, surrounded by bright lights. 

* * *

Ahri works, really, really hard. 

That also means avoiding conversations and stirring the pit of an overflowing pot, sometimes. 

She’s pretty sure Eve developed a heart murmur, asking all the wrong questions. 

“I’m sure it’s nothing.” Ahri says. “The house is just--” 

Ahri looks at the minimalist furniture, the decorium writing a gospel in her flesh. 

“The house is just quieter now.” 

She feels her throat hollow to each tick of the clock, as it sways and bellows to the sound of her sobbing at the shark swimming in the tank, wanting to get out.

(Suddenly she’s on the floor and notices the line of paint she forgets to touch over on the wall and the crack beneath it, and she can’t comprehend whether it was out of joy that she forgot about it, or the fact that she’s glanced over it enough--like wanting to touch the Earth and break it the way the wall is crumbling beneath her palm.)

Evelynn would often walk into the kitchen, the lines blurry as the coffee steams in the pot. “It’s not working,” she says. 

Ahri wants it to be the pot while Evelynn is experiencing heart burns.

“Eve, I’m busy.” 

The clinks are louder. Coffee threatening to spill on the floor. 

“You’re not, Ahri.” 

“You’re here.” 

* * *

Akali and Kai’Sa moved into the house. 

In between the words of gulping fish, Akali reassures Evelynn, and Kai’Sa cooks for them. 

They say no one leaves a home unless the home is the gaping maw of a shark--but there’s a stomach that can digest, a shoe fished up from a dirty river, and the shark wearing it. 

Ahri swims a lot--across the desert, wanting the shark to utter cries that sound like humans. 

The shark's mouth is open wide and she's trying to swim through the canines as if it's a wild animal, loud echoes of an empty belly in a large beast. 

She doesn’t remember when to rest. The moment she stepped into the music industry she’s told she was a language ready to be learned, hot planks of a pirate ship. The sea air is bloating with its own salt. 

The clinks of rum. Tears. There’s someone frightened, trying to walk the plank. The anchor is nailing itself on her grip, making it out as shark teeth and broken mirror pieces. 

She’s in Eve’s car, the driver’s seat, and her forehead pressed against the steering wheel. 

This is the risk of being known, a woman already dead and a victim of the part that loved.

She wants Evelynn to look at her. 

She wants the bright lights to be dimmer. 

The part that she loved about Evelynn is the part that is mortal. 

* * *

Kai’Sa tells her she was dreaming, not sea storms, but rooms. 

Ahri does this constantly, she walks in empty rooms and she sits in them and she wants to burn it all to the ground. 

“You bought this house Ahri.”

Ahri frustrates herself. Kai’Sa reaches for her shoulders. 

“You wanted me and Akali here.” 

_She does_. 

“The problem isn’t going to fix itself if you don’t talk to her.” 

_She’s building a house full of rooms that none of them could go into. Empty rooms. Lights blinking and stuttering._

Ahri is building a house inside their house.

She’s lonely when she loves. The immensity of it all--the tending of love itself. 

She needs to tell Kai’Sa this. 

_She needs Evelynn--all of them--near her. In the house, but she doesn’t want them finding her hiding place._

Evelynn will soon find it, exploit it to death so she can’t see it. Evelynn wants a lot of things, and Ahri isn’t one of them. A world where people fall over each other like decadent stacks of dominos, people to quarrel and fight with, 

and the ones who rage and ache rather than the one who burns. 

“Eve, Eve wants a lot of things.” 

Her hands loop behind Kai'Sa's back, palms clutching onto her shoulders and nose buried in Kai’Sa’s chest. She breathes in deeply. 

“It’d take hours to explain it.” 

Kai’Sa walks on the moon, stands on the moon, and she knows nothing of the moon. The waves fill her chest with nothing but gravity weighing down. 

“I’d listen to you for hours.” 

She smooths fingers into Ahri’s hair, lightly scratching her scalp. Words that comfort the flesh, warm skin pulling into the sun. 

“I know Eve would.” 

“Have I told you the kite story?” 

Ahri shakes her head, her hands around Kai’Sa’s waist now. 

“When it last stormed fifteen years ago, I had a crush on this girl next door and I didn’t know how to properly talk to her.” 

Kai’Sa sucks in a deep breath, amusement in her eyes. 

“So I tied my love letter up on the kite’s string, hung the house’s key to the tail--so if she wanted to come over.”

“I didn’t know you were that idiotic,” Ahri mumbles. 

Kai’Sa huffs a chuckle. 

“It was storming. So of course the lightning starts pouring and it hits the persimmon tree in my yard instead.” 

“My parents tried building me a bed with the broken wood.” 

_And no one sleeps in it_. 

She kisses Ahri’s forehead. “I think you’d have loved the love letter then.”

“You think?”

Kai’Sa nods, chin pressing down on Ahri’s head. 

“You’d do the same for Eve.”

* * *

_Hey now, are you trying to get a feature on Animal Planet?_

Akali loves the ocean. 

And to some degree, Evelynn does, too.

The waves fold over each other, as if they’re loving themselves.

Some days Akali brings back a bucket full of seawater and pranks Kai’Sa with it. It says it reminds her of the sand--grains that make her as she is. 

And fish. 

_At least pick a shark or something--_

Other times Kai’Sa boils the seawater. She’s weird like that--making salt out of it when Ahri stockpiles the cabinets. 

_\--something that can fight back._

It sits simmering in the pot, afternoon rewinding and Kai’Sa wraps paper towels around the fish cutlets. Dead fish. The smell of the sea and sleeping on crushed ice. 

The windows steam up and the house flakes like a storm is passing by. 

_These?_

In the evening the pot leaves a trail of salt crust, and Kai’Sa scrapes it out with a spoon. Evelynn, always, dips a finger in to taste it. Wanting the salt to linger, bitter in her mouth. The roof of it wanting to jump out and sea storm her wrists. 

_They’re just pets._

The future has wet and dry sand and Ahri sits there and ponders as she makes a bed in it. 

Akali feeds Ahri the spoon--it’s softer than she thinks, less like sand. It’s salt but there's something right in the middle of it, something else. 

“Eve.” Ahri brushes her hair aside, looking at her. 

_Did you know that if a shark stops moving,_

Something wide, and dark. It tastes like drowning, 

Ahri peers into the fish tank, fingernail tapping repeatedly on the glass. 

“They’re dying.”

_They do?_

like falling asleep on the shore and waking up to the tides up at her feet, wondering if she’d have gone on sleeping, 

would she have sunk? 

* * *

She’s trying to be human--becoming one. 

“They’re sleeping.” Eve tells her.

_They can’t sleep like normal, and when they do sleep,_

She doesn’t think she’ll ever be--becoming one that is. 

_They still have to keep swimming._

The waves are sleeping in their own skin. Ahri floats over them and she does not know what there is for tomorrow. 

Scribblings of song lyrics on her wall. 

_There’s no breaks, because once they take one--_

There's a narrative being written about the songs of the ocean's violent awakening.

_It’ll be all for nothing._

There's the sound that fractures at the end of--and hear this, she's closing her eyes and suddenly it's crater bombs on the water's surface and not the mimicry of ocean waves anymore

Ahri smells the earth's mold and the fish are dancing at the joy of it. She is thrown over--over Evelynn--like a net, and she's quivering as she tries to run faster. She's quivering as she is flung over into the crowd.

_It’s not fair. For other fish, swimming is swimming._

She’ll try to not tell too many lies, and take it as it comes. She’ll clutch the memories with both hands, sharp broken glass edges cutting her palms. 

_But for them?_

What would I’LL SHOW YOU say?

_How come …_

She stands up with her synapses and flesh and badgers her hands under Evelynn’s skin. 

_The only other choice is to drown?_

The bumps on her heart will language themselves. Mute mouths of the sea and land. 

She’s a bargaining chip for the violence that leaves Evelynn as she is. It has opened the house up, Akali the first person to have witnessed it fully. 

A knife slits in the fish’s belly.

And opens the wound.

* * *

“My mother didn’t wake up one morning and decided not to love me.” Akali scribbles in her notebook, looking at her right after. 

She peers to the side, feeling the pressure of Ahri’s eyes on her.

“I started--I started loving her.”

Akali crumbles the paper and tears it apart. 

“I started loving her more and more.”

Faey’s shadow overcasts the room. “And she starts loving me less and less.” 

“I had to figure out by myself.” 

“Until you and Evelynn found me.”

_Akali was lonely. She told them she was lonely, and the people passed by ate her on the streets._

“Life works that way.” 

Akali’s knees shake. Ahri puts her hand on them to stop her bounce. 

_It sits with her at night, tapping on the windows._

“I guess I’m dealing with it.” 

_Keeping her awake and aware._

* * *

Ahri finishes I’LL SHOW YOU two weeks later. 

She clings to Eve’s hand when it was offered, so something human might exist in her being. 

This isn’t a fight song, 

it’s about love.

* * *

Really, if the world was ending tomorrow she’d have much more time to think about this. 

_Come with me._

There’s a love that goes unreasonably because her and Eve have so much time. 

_You and I are going to love each other without fear._

_Because the world is ending tomorrow._

If only the world is ending tomorrow, then Ahri has so much to tell Evelynn. 

That she invented a world for herself, wanting to forget what Evelynn’s face was like. Where death is unknowable and a version of someone she loved was about to live there. 

* * *

“Hey.” Evelynn scrapes her fingernail lightly across Ahri’s ear. 

_(I hate the ocean, Eve.)_

They’re on the couch, Ahri’s head on Eve’s lap and a sad movie playing in the background. 

“What were you like?” 

Slits open wide like dilated pupils. 

“What am I like?” 

Evelynn kisses her fingers, caressing the hand she tries to be gentle with. 

“What were you like before you met me?”

“I was drowning.”

Golden irises perk to a spot on the ceiling fan’s slow rotation. A ball of yarn in a cat’s paw.

“I wanted to drown in so much of it. I didn’t think I’d even make it.” 

“But then I have you.” Ahri pushes upward with her elbows, the movement tickles Eve’s thighs. 

A hand guides to her cheek, 

“You have me,” Eve says.

_What are you now?_

the lights are blinking through the tank,

and Ahri bites Evelynn’s lower lip and kisses her fully.

_(I don’t want to swim anymore.)_

_Water._

**Author's Note:**

> i've never mushed four characters into a piece before, this is unexplored territory aaa
> 
> i love feedback <3 leave them and i'll gobble it up


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